


between the shadows and the stars

by ryyves



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Depression, Gen, I know it's not canon compliant but sometimes you just have an image you can't shake, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Reckless Behavior, Sexual Content, Suicidal Thoughts, post S1, pre S2, there's some pill-taking but it's not an overdose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-11
Updated: 2020-09-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:28:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26414173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryyves/pseuds/ryyves
Summary: The way Juno thinks of the city is this: leave a mark in the sand and a storm might cover it up, but you’ll always have the sand.Or: Juno leaves, but he can’t get Nureyev’s hair off his pillows.
Relationships: Peter Nureyev/Juno Steel (referenced), Rita & Juno Steel
Comments: 4
Kudos: 29





	between the shadows and the stars

**Author's Note:**

> Edit: I forgot it was a hotel room but I'm too lazy to take this one down.
> 
> * * *
> 
> Title from "Brooklyn" by The Midnight.

Juno’s pillowcase is covered with Nureyev’s hair. The strands are long and straight, so he knows they’re Nureyev’s. His bed is perfectly made, the pillow fluffed, but he can see those dark strands shivering like fractals on his pale sheets.

He dropped half a dozen calls in the office because all he could think of was Nureyev: hands on the small of his back, hands dipping even lower, that mouth and those sharp, long-lashed eyes closed. Juno watched Nureyev while they kissed. He watched Nureyev for hours in the dark, the rise and fall of his shoulders, the angle of his forehead when he was finally, finally relaxed. It took some time for Juno to recognize the tension in his shoulders around that smooth, sweet voice. That careful diction, every word laid out with precision, like he knew, from the start, how to work Juno’s heart.

Watching him sleep, Juno was deciding the shape of the rest of his life. This body in the dark, the way Juno’s bed dipped between them and Nureyev sliding into it. Lit by neon signs outside, Nureyev was haloed, splendid, more magnificent than anything in Hyperion City had a right to be.

But he was just one body. Juno told himself that as he disentangled himself from Nureyev’s bare legs, sliding off the bed without letting it squeak. He pulled on his discarded clothes in the dark, the glow of the city casting enough light that Juno could see perfectly; he slid his boots on without tying them.

He was in the doorway when something stirred. Nureyev, reaching out through the dark, blinking open his bleary eyes. Juno knew Nureyev could see him, there, bright against the darkened hallway.

Nureyev said, “Juno,” and it broke Juno’s heart.

Juno comes home and his front door is unlocked, which means Nureyev is gone. The door slides aside in a rush of air. Still, Juno holds his breath as he steps inside. He turns quickly to scan the whole room, the space behind the door, the kitchen doorway. It’s his, and it doesn’t feel like his.

It’s just his.

To believe he imagined a world where a lover would be there, waiting for him. Well. Nureyev waited long enough. Nureyev came back for him. And Juno pushed his luck.

If Nureyev had still been there, sitting in the living room reading one of Juno’s books, Juno would have stayed. He knows this the way he knows his body is held up by bones. The way he knows he can’t see through his right eye.

Instead, Juno enters an empty room. Clothes hang over the couch, and through the kitchen door, he can see plates piled in the sink and on the counters. It’s a small, three-room place—kitchen, living room, bedroom—and it’s not the mess Juno is worried about. These are all his things, his wardrobe, his television box, the stained rug he picked out at a secondhand warehouse to cover the pale, uniform floors. It’s been stained more since, with alcohol and food and sewer water from his shoes, and he never had the motivation or the products to clean them out.

He doesn’t want to enter his bedroom, but the door is open and he can see halfway into it from the door. The hospital corners, the covers pulled down in a sweeping triangle, as though inviting Juno to bed.

Juno thought he was making a clean break, but Nureyev’s was cleaner. It taunts Juno; it teases him.

He slams the bedroom door closed and sits on the couch. He takes his shoes off and his jacket and leaves them beside him, and the thing in his chest sits on his diaphragm and he can feel the misery behind his closed lips. Like he’s going to cry, maybe.

Every lover he’s ever had he’s walked out on, because it’s easier to keep it from hurting when you’re the one to make the incision. But no one has ever made his bed behind them.

And Juno knows he needs to mess up that bed. Knows that the longer it sits neat and tidy, the longer Nureyev has power over him. The longer it takes for Juno to get out.

Barefooted, Juno enters the bedroom and strips the bed. He bundles all the sheets on the floor until the hard mattress is the only thing that remains, and then he goes on to the pillow. Nureyev’s hair, soft and shining, falls onto his rug, clinging to his arms. He shivers.

There are things, Juno knows, you don’t say after nights like this. _I miss you_ being the big one. _I’m sorry_ being the other. They eat you alive. But as he removes the pillowcase, the heavy stench of Nureyev’s cologne, even so many hours after applying it, fills his head. It makes him dizzy.

But Juno Steel doesn’t cry, not as he carries his bundle of sheets to the washer set into the wall of the living room, not as he sets the cycle, not as he slides the paneled door across it.

His apartment doesn’t feel like his, just a space in which he lives. Unfamiliar, uncanny. Hollow, like whatever lies beyond Mars’ atmosphere, wherever Nureyev is now.

His head is too scattered to go out, and he needs to be alone. He pours himself a drink.

* * *

The apartment is empty every night after that. At first, Juno does nothing to fill it. He throws open all the windows and lets the stench of the city fill his space. He’s done this once before, with little success, but if he keeps the window open long enough, the city will take over and he will be home again.

Nureyev lingers in the corners of Juno’s apartment, colors every dream Juno has ever dreamed there.

Juno makes the bed again. He is careful not to tuck in all the corners.

And Nureyev’s hair, like cats’ hair, clings to the pillowcase. Juno turns it inside out and upside down, but he can still see it. He sees it on the ceiling when he turns the lights off and closes the window shields so he has absolute darkness, wriggling like something alive.

He drinks a lot when he’s home. He turns his comms off. Through the windows come the sounds of the city, wealthy people’s cars and pedestrians shouting at each other, laughing, their voice keening like something broken. Juno only has one eye with which to look at them, so he doesn’t look at all. These are the only sounds he can tolerate, and he can’t always tolerate them at all.

And over the top of the building opposite his, he can see the occasional descent of spacecraft through the dome. Passenger craft, trade craft. They land outside the city and are conveyed inside before anyone disembarks, and if any craft leave the city, well, Juno doesn’t see them once.

* * *

Juno walks through Hyperion City those first few days after the surgery. He takes those days off, doesn’t answer a single call from Rita. He kicks up trash and the dust that settles on all the streets no matter how airtight the dome. The kindest way he can describe the stink of the city is _lived-in._

Since leaving the HCPD and going freelance as a private eye, Juno has staked out a number of haunts — bars he’s gotten smashed in, abandoned buildings with functional external frames he’s scaled to the top, laundromats with water-weathered tiles and owners who let him sit on the machines and use their uplink services when his gets cut off.

But Juno Steel is not always a welcome face in the various hollows of the city. In bars, he dodges the stares of old acquaintances and close associates, faces that are no longer more beat-up than his. On street corners, it is only the eye patch that keeps old enemies from recognizing him. He sees them and makes his gaze dull. How many people have told him they’d recognize him anywhere with those bright, intelligent eyes?

There is nothing bright left in Juno Steel. The last bright thing hopped on a passenger craft three days ago and is three days deeper into the Milky Way.

Juno is still here, on Mars, and he has a life to live.

The motions of a life to carry out, at least. So he gets up every morning and lays out how he’s going to go about the day before he gets past his front door.

All his groceries fit in a single bag that he carries the two blocks home, swinging it from one hand, dozens of faceless people passing him, schoolkids and factory workers and businesspersons. He is faceless to them, too; the only part of him that’s remarkable is the eye patch. He doesn’t have much of an appetite, because his head is turning so fast he can’t catch his breath and the thing that hangs from his ribs makes his stomach do awful things. He arranges his rations on a single shelf in his kitchen and stands in the kitchen for a long time, staring at them. He holds the counter until his arms lock up.

He doesn’t have the energy to run his laundry, so he re-wears t-shirts, sweaters, even socks. He calls himself pathetic three dozen times a day. When he’s dressing in the morning, pulling clothes out of his hamper; when he’s cutting his rations in thirds because that’s all he can stomach; when he’s locking the door and testing it. When Rita looks at him with those big eyes and he says, “I’m fine.”

And when he takes jobs, his heart isn’t in them. And then he aims, fires, misses. Misses again.

He doesn’t tell Rita that he can’t do it, but he can’t. He takes another case and misses, and then he knows.

Everything that Juno Steel built himself on, the only thing he had to hold onto when every night was a black hole, means nothing.

He is seeing familiar faces in familiar lights down every byroad and avoiding all of them. He is drinking cheaper booze.

He is Juno Steel, and he doesn’t have a name to call his own.

* * *

So Juno is out of a job.

This doesn’t keep him from getting calls. He’s made a name for himself in his city, even if he doesn’t have a billboard with his face on any of its avenues. Thank the heavens for small mercies, he thinks.

He comes in to work every day, though most days he doesn’t want to. Sometimes he’s on time, and sometimes he’s half an hour late or later, but he’s trying not to worry Rita. She doesn’t deserve to watch her world crumble, too.

Mostly he answers the calls before Rita’s quick fingers can. This way, he gets to say _No_ first. _I’m sorry, but I can’t take your case._

Find yourself a PI who can actually do the work, he wants to say. Who can fire true.

Nothing changes in the office, except Rita watches more and more TV. Juno can hear it through her door, but he doesn’t have the heart to ask her to turn it down.

Juno only has so many creds set aside, and as the weeks go on with no work, he has to use them. His bills grow and grow. He still pays Rita her regular wage. It eats like Martian rain into his savings, but he doesn’t want Rita to have to dip into hers. He is trying to figure out how to say, _You should start thinking about finding another job._ He isn’t a private eye anymore, and he doesn’t know if he ever will be. Still, he can’t bring himself to quit. To close up the office, to send Rita on her way, to say goodbye to the last solid thing in his life. Not a body in bed but a mind, holding his in place.

He doesn’t think she’s caught on.

Juno coverts the office into a shooting range. He pushes his desk to the corner of the room and wheels in a small practice cube, much smaller than the one he has at home. Rita watches with wary interest from her door.

He needs something to do with all that time in the office, so he might as well re-teach himself himself to shoot.

Every time Juno fires, he can hear Rita’s panicked squeal.

And even when he’s shooting, he’s bored. He itches all over with the sort of body-itch that only being on a job can solve, so he closes the office up early and sends Rita home. Every time he does so, he feels bad for cutting Rita’s hours, so he starts taking walks. He doesn’t know what to do with himself, but the city is big and he hasn’t seen all of it yet.

That’s what this is, he tells himself: the desire to see the world. As though that was the promise he’d broken.

And it clicks, not like a good case but like something dropped from a seventh-story apartment window, just low enough to hear when it crashed to the pavement below.

The way he is so careful to avoid hurting Rita. To avoid leaving her in the rainwater of his bad decisions, in an apartment as empty as his with nowhere else to go.

The way Rita keeps trying to talk to him and he keeps looking out the window. This window is so low, he can’t see any spacecraft through it. Well, mostly Hyperion City stays to itself. It sits there in the red, red desert, the relic of some old beacon for humanity, a green light turned red. A shameful memory. The mud beneath the boot of the galaxy.

Like Juno has ever worried what the rest of the galaxy thinks of his city.

Juno walks slowly in the direction of his apartment, taking side streets and byroads. His heavy boots land heavily on the sidewalk. Sometimes he tempts fate and walks in the road, just a few feet out from the curb, his hands in his pockets. Between his pockets and his eye, his reaction time is halved and halved again. The rumble of the city, of old pipes and factories and cars rumbling over litter and discarded ration bars and discarded animals picking at both, fills him up. His heart starts to rumble in time. It’s home; it’s always been home.

Buildings rise around him like teeth, shining in the late-afternoon sun. The old stone low-rises look like dispassionate titans. Juno’s feet stick to whatever’s coating the pavement. He is in his body the way he never is indoors, and his body is the city. The wind kicked up by passing cars rustles against the skin of his neck, his tightly-curled hair.

It has never felt like freedom, living in Hyperion City, but it has always felt like falling in love.

He pops into his regular drugstore for a bottle of painkillers and sleeping pills. He wonders, briefly, if he should get more than one each, if he should start preparing for the inevitable, but he is so tired. The store has neon lights inside and they amp up Juno’s headache. All those half-stocked shelves, those glittering bottles and pills and patches, gauze and salves and syringes, they make Juno uneasy. The cashier is a young person with heavy bags under their eyes. Juno will have time to come back if he needs anything. He’s so tired. He pays and leaves.

Two days after that, the drugstore goes under. He passes it in the evening and all the lights are off. A flickering sign on the other side of the window reads, _For lease._ The painkillers are still in Juno’s pocket.

A week later, a big-name chain takes its place.

The city waits for no one.

Each week, the grocery store has less and less on its shelves. That’s okay, mostly, because each week Juno Steel has less and less money in his pocket. He walks through the aisles, looking less at the products and more at the people who come in. He studies faces — the slope of noses, the set of shoulders, thin hands and blunt hands reaching out and emptying the shelves. They have hungry cheeks, but each person wears them in a different way. The teenage boy pushing a stroller with a red-faced baby and holding the hand of a red-faced five-year-old. The woman in stained overalls tracking red sand all over the tile. The man with the well-tailored floral suit who looks like Nureyev until Juno’s gaze reaches his pale blond hair. It’s slicked back in exactly the same way.

Juno turns before he has a chance to breathe, or gasp, or swallow hard. His heart slams against his ribs. It’s not him, Juno tells himself. It will never be him.

He made sure of that. Only one person in Juno’s life ever came back, and Juno betrayed him.

Okay, he thinks, with his hand tracing the labels of meat cubes. Tell it like it is.

It is easier to look at the city. To think only of the city. To become the city, until his bones turn to brick and his skin to rust and his eyes to trash in the street and he finally makes himself useful.

He could be in and out of the grocery store in five minutes, but there’s something about the intimacy of shopping alongside a dozen people whose names he doesn’t know that keeps him inside, browsing concentrated produce. These people aren’t familiar the way the people of Old Town are, part of the bones and blood of him. Once, he could have helped them. If he could shoot, he could help them. If he was quicker, smarter, talented at anything other than the pull of a trigger, he could change their lives.

He laughs, right there in the grocery store under the green light, and his hands look like growing things. It’s a nice neighborhood, given what he can afford; it’s not rich, but it’s certainly nicer than Old Town. And if anyone looks, he doesn’t see them.

When he gets back to his apartment, though, he lets himself groan. The windows are still open, and he can hear children playing their late-afternoon games on the sidewalk, in the small ball park around the corner. He removes his shoes and jacket and pulls off his sweater until he’s just in an undershirt. Hyperion City is climate-controlled, so Juno shouldn’t be this cold. He touches his forearms and finds them sticky with sweat. Nureyev, Nureyev, says his head.

Screw Nureyev, says the rest of him. Look at what’s right in front of you.

He doesn’t look. Instead, he fills a glass of water, puts two sleeping pills on his mouth, and swallows them dry. Then he chugs the glass and leaves it in the sink. He leaves the bottle beside the sink, too, the lid half-closed. It doesn’t matter that it’s seven, that the light is still heavy over the tops of the buildings, that half of the city is gold. That golden light doesn’t reach him. There is nothing precious here.

He’s powerless, just another citizen of Hyperion City with nothing to his name except the apartment he comes home to every night, empty and still.

Juno falls back on the couch, letting one leg hang off. He pulls the blanket off the couch back and covers himself haphazardly. Every time he thinks of touching himself, shame curls around in his gut and he can’t get past his belt buckle.

Mostly he sleeps in his trousers, too.

He doesn’t have to admit anything to anyone.

The sleeping pills fill his head up with fog, and he welcomes it. He doesn’t have to stay awake if he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t have to face the city, or himself, or the whole damn world.

* * *

Juno climbs the stairwell of his building to the top floor, where a door at the end of the hall opens up on the roof. In his hand swings a half-empty bottle of whiskey. He needs something strong, and he’s already been through a couple of glasses. He’s not carrying any glasses, now.

His isn’t the tallest building in his neighborhood, residential or otherwise, but he can see much of the skyline. Not to the edge of the dome, not even it its center. Old Town remains obscured to him, its buildings lower and closer to rot, which means as long as he’s here, he’s out.

He sets his bottle on the roof and steps up onto the rim. It’s big enough that his feet only take up half of it, and Juno stands perfectly in the middle. No wind comes to buffet him. You can only feel a wind in Hyperion City when a car drives past you; mostly the Martian breeze parts around the dome. From up here, he can see a sandy wind battering the edges. He isn’t in any danger, not unless he makes it himself, and he doesn’t know if that makes him feel better or worse.

It’s the middle of the night, and the stars are flickering their billions of messages in Morse. Juno dabbled in Morse for a while, after Rita solved a case for him that hinged on the code, but he can’t make out a word.

He extends his arms and relishes the dangerous sensation of standing at the edge of the world. The night people twenty-odd stories below him don’t look up, and why would they? Before he joined the PD, he never looked up, either. Except to dream. He’d stare straight past the buildings, through the plasma dome, toward the candy-colored stars.

Well. He has not touched the stars, nor is he forgiven, and mostly that’s fine by him.

Nowadays, he can’t call anything fine.

Below him, the dark, narrow roads look like mouths, full of people walking back and forth and not seeing him. A car whizzes by, the sandbank sound of its motor and the louder sound of trash caught in its exhaust reaching Juno. His city. His tired, broken, beautiful city.

After he has stood on the lip of the roof so long that the fire goes out of him, he takes a long drink and shakes his head with it. He lies down on the flat, smooth surface. This far up, most of the city’s neon doesn’t touch him. He can see billboards, though, hotel signs and climbing trellises of light so vibrant that if the sky were still brown, it would look the same as day.

He imagines billboards with his face, mangled and bared for the world to see. They say _Private Eye._ They say, instead, _Failure._

It wouldn’t be the meanest trick this city has up its sleeve. He’s pretty much done the job himself.

Stop looking, he tells himself, and looks up.

The plasma has a faint glow that never goes away, and Juno can make out wriggling shapes of light in the dome, places where the plasma is thicker and brighter. It’s like a skin, he thinks, adaptable, safe. It’s comforting to think of the city as a living being, but it leaves something bitter in his mouth, too. He can see the stars through it. He’s only ever seen the stars through it. Constellations don’t mean much to him now, although he has a fair bit of knowledge of ancient mythology and quite a bit more of astronomy and he at least knows the major constellations by heart. Beyond Polaris, Betelgeuse, and Vega (thanks to Nureyev), though, mostly the stars are just dots in the sky.

He thought the air would clear his head, but he’s had the windows open for a week and the air is no different outside. This should be enough to replace thoughts of Peter Nureyev, but now the city sits on his chest instead.

All his love and loyalty aren’t going to change anything in a city to whom he is just another tooth in its mouth. A toothache, that’s what he is. He laughs, and then he’s laughing hard, his body prone on its back, laughing for the whole city.

A sound returns to him, high-pitched and gleeful. A kid, maybe, out past curfew. Faintly, distantly, the city laughing back.

* * *

Juno Steel is going to bars and getting smashed. He has enough liquor in his apartment, mostly the cheap and strong kind, but he doesn’t know how to whip up the kind of fruity cocktail he craves and even if he did, he doesn’t have what he needs. He likes the crush of bodies, shoulders against his shoulder and hands touching the small of his back as their owners drift past without sparing a glance for Juno. There’s no electricity, but sharing a dark, neon-lit room with two-hundred other people in dancing clothes brings as close a thrill to Juno’s throat as he’s going to get in his state.

He doesn’t see Nureyev in every dark-haired dancers. He doesn’t see Nureyev’s hands in the bartenders’. He is looking to get lost in the unfamiliar.

And when the man with gold everywhere—his ears, his neck, lining the collar of his slim suit jacket—rests his elbow on the bar next to Juno and orders something possibly even fruitier than what Juno’s nursing, Juno plays coy.

He’s on his first drink, today, and that’s as far as he’s going to get. Because the man touches him on the shoulder and smiles.

Once, a smile like that would have done something to Juno, but now Juno stares through it.

The man says, “You’re a million miles away, aren’t you?”

“You’re dressed nice,” says Juno, and recognizes the lilt of his voice. He hadn’t expected to slide so easily into long-forgotten habits, but this man is pretty and warm and Juno wants hairs on his pillow that aren’t Nureyev’s. Selfish? Yes, but necessary. So he doesn’t think when he speaks. He isn’t drunk, but being tired does the trick well enough.

“I wouldn’t come to a place like this looking like a slob.” The voice is low and rough, the kind he hates in superiors but adores in lovers.

Juno laughs, because he knows exactly how Juno Steel looks. His long coat, the mysterious one, and boots so covered with mud he would be the suspect of every crime that happened here.

The man laughs, too. “Not if I wasn’t looking for someone.”

“Anyone?”

“Hm. Not just anyone. But you fit the bill.”

“I think I like where this is going,” says Juno.

Hesitating, the man reaches up and takes Juno’s jaw. Something wavers in Juno, so close to snapping. But instead of bringing Juno into a kiss, the man runs his fingers down Juno’s throat. Juno swallows and thrills with it. The man’s fingers settle in the dip of Juno’s collarbones, soft and warm as a bird.

Juno is thinking about that hand trailing down his chest, over his stomach, those nails scraping his waist until Juno shivers. He is thinking about keeping his jacket on and doing whatever this man wants done to him.

And the man clearly sees it on Juno, because he asks, “Now or later?”

“How about now?”

They finish their drinks and Juno pays for both. Whatever his finances are, he wants the man to see him as capable. He clings to the man’s arm as they leave the bar, barely buzzed but drunk enough on the idea of bringing someone into his bed. Sometimes he wakes up and all the sheets are bundled in front of him, pressed to his stomach, like a body.

They are halfway down the block when Juno stumbles. This is the moment he has to make a choice: to put Nureyev in the past, dig so much soil over the grave, or to be loyal. Or cling to the ideal of an ideal lover.

He almost laughs. Come on. There’s nothing to be loyal to, and he’s not going to break the heart of a drunken fling.

He says, even though he knows this man’s home is nicer than his, “Come to mine.”

And inside, when Juno finally lets the man kiss him, Juno can block everything out. Hands pushing up his shirt, sliding inside his waistband. Juno has the man against the door, and their bodies do the work for them.

And then, to be a tease, Juno goes into the kitchen. While he pours two glasses, the man’s hands reach around Juno to his chest. With one hand, Juno guides him. When he touches Juno’s nipple, Juno closes his eyes, and a splash of whiskey lands on his toes.

“One… one second,” Juno says. The man’s hands still until Juno corks the booze and sets it back on the counter. He turns to face his lover, leaning up and catching him in a kiss. It’s warm and hungry, and Juno tells himself that’s enough. Against those lips, Juno mumbles, “We’re not going to need these, are we?” And feels like another betrayal of Nureyev. He refuses to back out.

“I don’t think we will.”

So Juno takes him to bed.

Of course he does. And he’s not the only one. The man is so sweet that Juno is rough in bed, because he needs to work Nureyev out of his system. The thrill of his body, tense as he moves. The way he lets his body talk for him. And when the man’s moans fill up his bedroom, Juno feels triumphant.

Later, with different lovers, he will be so, so sweet. It depends on how sad and how sober he is each evening. The weeks go on and it’s the only thing that makes sense. It keeps his head from remembering how Nureyev’s breath tasted, how soft and hungry his lips, his back silhouetted against the sky, how he promised he would come back and then he did.

In the mornings, when each lover leaves, Juno changes the sheets. He runs them before he goes in to work, and the wash-dry cycle has them fluffed and ready when he comes home.

It is weeks later when Juno realizes what drew him to the man in gold. It was the way he spoke, those careful, weighted words; that carefully tailored appearance. Peter Nureyev is everywhere, it seems.

Juno starts leaving unfamiliar beds in the early morning. He starts leaving his own bed. After dressing, he goes out to get air, leaving nothing to tell them where he’s gone. The city is big and he could be anywhere. But each of them have only seen him in neon bar lighting, street lighting, and in his dim apartment, always half in shadow and hyperrealistic. He never sleeps with anyone with the light on. The city is wide awake at dawn, and Juno fits easily into its anonymous crowds. Everything he does comes from this: he is looking to be lost.

He is looking to lose himself.

Anyway, it is better for everyone if Juno Steel is alone.

And when he comes back, fortunately, mercifully, they are gone.

Not one person makes the bed.

* * *

Juno goes into the office every morning for Rita’s sake. She is a little sun, and he doesn’t want to leave her to an empty office day after day. Of course she could fill it with her shows and her soaps, but he knows Rita.

And, honestly, he needs the company. Rita talks no matter Juno’s mood, and he lets her. He keeps the door open between their offices, and she takes the opportunity to talk his head off. But he needs someone to listen to while his head’s a mess. The more she talks, the less he has to. The less he has to listen to his breath. It’s comforting, comfortable, safe.

Sometimes the comms ring and Juno answers it, and sometimes Rita passes cases to Juno. He takes them and says, “I’ll look at them.”

“You’d better, Mister Steel,” says Rita. “You’ve got people counting on you.”

She has no idea how that hurts. How close he is to saying, _No one can count on me, not even you,_ and sending her on her way. Except he can’t send her away without the means to support herself until she finds another job, and he has very few options as to how to do that.

He says, “Doesn’t make me any better at my job.”

“You know that’s not true as much as I do,” says Rita. She slides her chair back. It hits the back wall of her office, and she stares through the doorway at him. “You’re the best at your job. The best there is. You just need some adjusting your depth perception.”

“Rita, lay off. I’m dealing with it.”

“Yeah, I can see you shooting a hole in this dump of an office. Every day you come in, you say, Sure, Rita can’t hear me through all that door, but let me tell you, I can and I do and I don’t like it at all. I don’t want to come in one morning and see a big, gaping hole in the door. Do you need a vacation to the shooting range?”

Juno sighs. “That’s not a vacation, Rita. That’s just more busywork.”

“I’m just saying,” she tells him, stern but not nearly as stern as she can get. “We’re a respectable establishment. What if somebody comes through that door right now? You could blow off their head.”

“I’ll be careful not to blow any heads.”

After she closes the door, Juno organizes his desk for the second time that week. When he’s done with that, he organizes his digital office space. The training cube hangs beyond the screen, and every time he glances up, his hand reaches for his blaster. Damn. He can’t be making a habit out of this, blaster practice in the office.

It’s draining work, all that organizing, especially when he has nothing new to add to it. Rita passes cases to him and then slides her chair back and explains the cases much more elaborately. Juno reviews each and every one. He doesn’t take one.

That’s not entirely fair. The moment the comms ring or that notification pops up or Rita’s voice says, “I’m sure this one’ll catch your fancy,” Juno knows he won’t take it. He lets Rita answer the phone, but he picks up the other line when she starts spinning praises. The Juno she could trust is gone, but the Juno who trusts her isn’t.

Even as he turns down a job, he knows that it might not get put right at all without him. Every job that he lets slip through his fingers makes Hyperion City a little bit worse. Darker, dirtier.

And the thing he doesn’t acknowledge, even to himself: every time he takes a statement over the comms or listens to Rita describe a client’s needs, his head starts spinning. Ideas emerge, fully-formed, behind his eyes. He knows where he would start, how he would comb the city, the things he could do. He can practically lay out the investigation in his head before the client has finished speaking.

And it isn’t fair, because he can’t do any of it. They thrill him, thoughts like these. They hold every promise of who he once one, who he would still be if not for a man who trusted him.

Well. Everyone gets to be a fool sometimes. But most fools don’t let their cities down.

He doesn’t say a word to Rita about the thing in his chest. She has enough to deal with. Instead, he listens to her chatter about programming and origami and architecture and the television programs that run nonstop from her office, low but unmistakable. She’s so much smarter than him. Hell, she’s qualified to be the PI instead. She’s worth so much more than the pay he can afford for her. And every day that passes without a case, Juno becomes more convinced that they’re in the wrong jobs altogether.

Juno Steel, wash-up. Juno Steel standing in the office’s bathroom staring at his reflection, his dark eye so devoid of light he could be dead.

“You know, boss,” Rita says one day as he’s coming out of the bathroom. Her voice is so careful, so concise, that it sets off bells in Juno’s head. She must be at her desk, because Juno can’t see her.

Juno says, “Whatever it is, I’m sure I don’t want to talk about it.”

But no force of man nor god can stop Rita when she has something she wants to talk about. She says, “Oh, I’m sure you won’t. But the thing is, I’ve run the numbers and I know how much we’re making right now, and that number’s a big, fat zero. We haven’t taken a job in weeks. But you’re still paying me, just as much as ever.”

She wants to know where the money comes from. And she has a right to know.

Juno leans back so far in his chair that his spine cracks in several places. Rita’s words sink deep in his chest. His voice is so tired. “You got me. But I’m just doing what any good boss would, making sure you eat at night.”

In a small voice, Rita says, “Do you want me to… leave, or something?”

Juno’s head snaps up. For a second, the exhaustion goes out of his tone. “What?”

“I’ve just been thinking. You don’t have to spend all your hard-earned creds on me. I… you don’t have to keep me around if it’s getting you down. If you want me to leave, you can just tell me, you know.”

“Are you kidding?” says Juno. “You’re the best there is. I wouldn’t give you up for the world.”

“But,” says Rita, so quiet. “You keep saying you’re not a PI anymore. And if we’re not going to take any more jobs, I can’t in good conscience put you out like this. I’ll be fine, honest.”

Juno gets up and goes to Rita’s door. Peering in, he sees her at the window, her chair pushed out. Her hair is silhouetted in the midday light, wisps of it pulled out of her short braid. Even under the office light, her back is deep in shadow. She is standing at the edge of a world he can’t touch. He has clearly caught her in the middle of pacing. When she looks at him, her eyes are raw, a fierce determination in them.

“Rita,” he says, his voice so soft it wouldn’t stir a piece of paper. She turns to him and he can’t see her face, just highlights — the tip of her nose, the sweep of her hair, her eyes shining like stars. Shining too much, he thinks, like she’s going to cry.

Oh, damn. Everything he does hurts somebody, and Rita has never been that far down on the list. All this time, she’s been too close to him to be safe.

“It’s okay,” he says. To her credit, Rita doesn’t sniff. Juno wonders if he imagined it. Her hands twist at her sides, like she’s trying not to shake them. He can see her face scrunch up a second before she huffs. A second before she paces toward him, past him, in her rickety heels. Juno backs into the doorway and lets her. Her face is so intense it could raze a city. Her arms cross her body, and she chews on a lock of hair. Maybe she was crying, he thinks, working herself up about the possibility that Juno should leave her to the elements, but in this light, he can’t tell from her face. He isn’t sure he wants to know. He isn’t sure how much he wants to be responsible for. The terrible responsibility of holding a heart.

He sighs, and, finally, he decides to lie. He tells her, “I set a few thousand creds aside in case something should happen, in case something bad happened to the business. Small end of a few, but it should be enough.”

She stares at him with her sharp eyes, and he knows he wears nothing but exhaustion in his eyes. He is thinking about going out tonight. He is thinking of staying home and taking his pills and passing out. About the walk home, staring after Rita’s receding back until her figure disappears among the crowd. “I want to, Rita. More than anything, I want to be what I was. I want to be proud of me, or I want… I don’t know. Something, anyway.”

“I’m proud of you,” says Rita. She doesn’t even hesitate, and that’s what hurts the most.

Juno’s chest goes so tight he thinks, for a minute, his ribs have broken. How easy it would be to say, _You shouldn’t._ How easy to say, _I’m not worth it. I promise you._ He can hear it in his head, louder than Rita’s voice, every rough edge of it.

“Yeah,” says Juno, and he doesn’t know if it’s a lie. “Well. I guess someone has to be.”

But Rita isn’t ready to drop it. She is sizing Juno up, working her painted lips, and Juno knows he has to speak before she can launch her assault. He says, “Why haven’t you quit before? Not since all this happened, but ever.”

Whatever words Rita had inside her vanish. She slides into her chair, spins once in it, and rolls it up against her desk. She flicks the TV off, and the silence that falls over the office is heavy as sand and just as hard to breathe in. Juno leans against the door frame, and meanwhile the light falls across Rita’s hair like a halo.

Indignant, Rita says, “Who else would appreciate my talents?”

“You don’t think that,” says Juno.

“That the world isn’t kind?” She is dodging, but he lets her. He isn’t as sharp as he used to be. “Nah, that’s your thing. Mister I’m So Grumpy And Brooding. And let me tell you, it’s not always easy to see the world as good. I’ve seen everything you’ve seen. I know what people can do to other people. But you, Mister Steel, you’re the best shot this city has at being… good, and kind. I believe that, just like I believe that you have to look for the good in people first.” She smiles, so small and so raw. “So where’s the Mister Steel who sees the good first?”

“Stop,” he says, and his head is so foggy he isn’t sure how clear it comes out. The praise makes him dizzy, sinks like an anchor into the pit of his stomach, cold and immovable. It fills him with panic. “Stop. That’s… thank you, Rita, but it’s not necessary. I know what I’m good for.”

 _The world is good,_ he thinks. That isn’t right. A headache starts behind his brow, and he squeezes his eyes shut. _The world can be good._

“And I’m nothing without you,” he admits.

Rita’s litany of screens obscures her mouth, but she stares at him with her bright eyeshadow and light mascara and the faint blemishes across her cheeks uncovered, and he doesn’t know what she’s thinking.

And he can’t look at her. He can’t keep standing here, in this sunlit room with its deep shadows, his eye like a window for her to see through. He steps out into his office and pulls the door closed. There, he rests his shoulders against the glass, breathing. If she opens the door, he’ll fall inward, but she doesn’t. And for a moment, he can hear nothing, just his breathing and the rustling of his coat.

Then Rita says, “We both know that’s not true.” Her voice is muffled.

Juno can hear footsteps through the door. The door shakes, and Juno looks over his shoulder to see the shape of Rita’s orange sweater, her hair pressed against the glass.

“You can’t talk me out of this one, Rita”

“I know,” she says. “But I’m still gonna try. Whatever I’m worth, I’m doing it by working for you. And we’re doing amazing work, you and me, so don’t you dare forget it.”

He smiles, but it turns bitter in a second. Still, his voice is as warm as he can make it. “Thanks, Rita.”

* * *

Juno had done some reading while he was still a trainee cop in the HCPD, young and idealistic, with time on his hands to read books he didn’t need to. Juno has always been a punch first, read books later sort of person, thoroughly unladylike, but, unfortunately, becoming a cop meant he had to hit the library.

Mostly, Juno is content to let the past stay the past. Why fill his head with long-learned lessons when he could focus on the perpetrators in front of him? When he could feel out an environment in the heat of the moment, his whole body prickling with adrenaline?

Not everyone read up on the history of Hyperion City, which meant that Juno had a leg up. But he’s still second-best, because Earth has its claws in Hyperion City to this day. Hyperion City, named for an ancient Earth mythos: an overthrown titan. A starwatcher. Not stargazer but namer of stars.

Juno thinks about this a lot when he walks through the streets, hundreds of stories of stonework and glass above him. Between the plasma shield making the stars watery as eyes and the densely-packed buildings, the sky is almost obliterated. Sometimes, if he’s lucky, he catches a conjunction in the sky, Jupiter and Saturn, maybe, or Earth and Venus. They don’t mean anything to him, but they’re more interesting, for one night, than the static constellations fading out above the skyline.

A lot like people, he thinks.

He did a bit more research when he went freelance, when he was his own secretary and PR manager first. Earth was so many years ago, long surpassed by the wonders of the planets once thought to be uninhabitable, the ripples that each new colonized planet made in the fabric of the universe.

Hyperion was just a name among any, like Cronus, like Theia, and nothing he could find in English told him anything more than that. Well. The past has never offered its secrets to him, and he’s never been bothered to taste them. Earth is a memory, a dream.

Yet he carries its names. So what does that make him? When will he be just another footnote in a grand mythology, magnificent by proxy?

If he were to name the city now, he might call it _Atlas._ Centuries ago, before the war, the whole future of humanity rested on this city. The first colony, living proof that the dome worked on any uninhabitable terrain. It was the only reprieve from a crumbling planet, a beacon of light for humanity.

There is literature on Atlas, though his eyes glaze over after half an article and he leaves it there. He can feel the weight of it on the back of his neck, these long-dead words telling his life story, its whispered promise: _You will give of yourself always, and then you will die._

Hyperion City, its buildings rusted by the Martian air that even the sturdiest dome couldn’t keep entirely out. Hyperion City, collapsed and stacked haphazardly upon itself. A titan of a city, squatting to hold humanity up among the stars, crushed under its own weight. Under the weight of its own promises. Juno’s job takes him all throughout the city, or it did. Most of is life he’s spent in its center, though, in the polluted sprawl of recycled air, billboards and neon signs with dark human shapes in their shadows, squeaky doors and busted windows and litter no rainwater could ever wash away and buildings collapsing from the inside, and everyone inside trying to hold onto this small, frantic thing they call a life in Hyperion City.

The way Juno thinks of the city is this: leave a mark in the sand and a storm might cover it up, but you’ll always have the sand.

Somewhere Old Town, invisible from his bedroom window, from his office window, from the door of his drugstore, from the houses of his wealthy clientele, but he always knows it’s there. It prickles his bare skin like a watching eye. Somewhere it is still holding him, piggybacking him like a little kid.

And suddenly Juno is desperate to be a starwatcher, not a city walker, listening to old recordings of stellar sound waves, the pulsating sky. Because somewhere among those stars is Peter Nureyev, seeing the galaxy, seeing the whole damn universe. Without Juno.

Juno has been desperate like this before. Desperate to stay. He can taste it like blood in his mouth, like blood dribbling from a burst eye socket, thick and warm, gagging him.

The blood is, like a marvel, at the center of everything Juno is.

He would be lying if he said the thought of Peter Nureyev doesn’t bring back memories of that scent, those hands sliding up his chest, through his hair. He would be lying if the thought of Peter Nureyev didn’t make him go weak somewhere deep inside, his knees or his chest.

Nureyev was too beautiful, inside and out, and Juno was too deep in love. Someone had to walk away first. That’s the way the story always goes.

So you don’t have any excuse to feel bad about it, Juno tells himself. Get up and get the hell over it. People leave; it’s practically what they’re for. And the people closest to you leave the biggest hole.

He is beginning to think he didn’t get the best end of the bargain. But a lover’s tryst always means some sort of bargain, and he made good on his terms.

Juno walks through his city at night, his hands in his pockets and a blaster holstered, mostly for comfort, and one eye and nothing to fear. His roots are everywhere. They stretch beneath his feet, snaking through the sewers and the city’s underground and deeper, to the sand beneath the dome. To the very center of the planet and straight out to the other side.

He passes a hundred people before he reaches the petulant door of his apartment building, and he doesn’t recognize a single one.

The city can be beautiful — after the road cleaners come by with their recycled water, puddles shining under flickering neon; early in the morning, before the sky’s changed but while the stars still look like stars; lunch hour from his office window, a million people in glittering jackets flocking like birds.

But these are things Juno only knows from walking these streets every damn day, his feet slamming against pavement, the smell of too many open dumpsters and imported floral perfume. The city is noisy as always, but its nighttime sounds take on a new quality, distant and indistinguishable. He hears conversations too loudly or not at all. If he hums in his apartment, he is dead silent on the streets, his coat flapping around his knees.

He is looking in all the wrong places: under his feet, over his shoulder. Whatever he’s looking for doesn’t have the guts to show its face.

So what did Hyperion City look like, flying away?

Did Nureyev see the city first, or the sand, or Juno? Did he ever look back at all?

A part of Juno hopes that he didn’t. He is fooling himself with thoughts of clean breaks and cleaved buildings and a sky split with stars, but some things don’t have enough structural integrity to fall straight down.

* * *

And Juno lose hours. He loses them while walking; in evenings alone with his glass and those damn sheets that never stay clean long enough to wipe the memory of Nureyev’s hand from Juno’s cheek; and in his office. Mostly in his office. He comes in on time, pulls up nothing on his screens, stares out the window. Stares out the window. Like an antique file, corrupted and hiccuping, he stares out the window and the people are just people, never and always the same at once.

Every morning starts like this, the empty space in his apartment calling his name. It stirs the dust that’s settled across his living room desk, across the coffee table, across the myriad of plates he only cleans before a night out. It’s worked for him this long, which means he’s it’s fast becoming a habit.

Today, he can place the name before his eyes open, but that doesn’t mean he wants to open his eyes.

“Mister Steel? Hey, you dead in there or something?” says the voice, which is how Juno knows he isn’t dead. He hears her while his head is somewhere dark and foggy, some dream dissipating in front of him. He’s not in his apartment.

Juno opens his eyes and all he sees is dark, neon reflecting in patches off the screen in front of him. His chest aches from the cold surface of the desk. He sits up in his wobbly chair, and that alone is enough to make his vision black out. For a second, panic shoots through him, and he reaches out to grip the desk. Something drifts past him, something he can barely name, but it burns in his chest, like a hand brushing across his shoulders. He reaches for it in his head, and then it’s gone.

The groan that fills the room is coming from him. “What time is it?”

“It’s time to go home, boss.” For a second he thinks she’s going to say _Juno,_ not _boss,_ and it scares him in a way he doesn’t understand. “Maybe a little after time to go home, really. You fell asleep after lunch so I put your plate on the windowsill and I didn’t want to wake you up at all, really, because you drink like six coffees each day and I really don’t think you’re sleeping. Your eye’s so dark all the time and sometimes when you come in I think you just got into a fight, honest, and—”

“Rita,” says Juno. His voice comes out thick and groggy, not quite connected to his body. He forgot how much he hated sleeping during the day. “You’re right. You should go home.”

“You’re not going to to stay here,” Rita says uncertainly.

“Nah.” Juno lets his eyes slip closed, and when he opens them, he sees the concern on Rita’s face has grown. “I’ll lock up. I just… need a second to wake up.” While he sits there, half in sleep, Rita paces the office, like she has something she’s trying to say. Juno gets acquainted with the office, with the dizzying drop from the window behind him, with his own hands pressing against his face. It’s just his space, his and Rita’s, and it shouldn’t be as big or frightening or full of monsters as it is. More than anything, he knows that he wants to get out. But he doesn’t know how.

Rita says, “Are you okay to go home alone? Do you want me to walk you home?”

He holds up a hand. “No, I’m fine. Promise.” He can’t put his head straight. The office is dark except for the bathroom light through the open door, and all its familiar shapes are lying in wait.

“Yeah, well, that’s the thing about promises,” says Rita. “I’d really feel much better if you come sleep on my couch or something. You haven’t been looking too good lately, is all.”

“I have sleeping pills at home. I’m fine.”

“That’s what someone who isn’t fine would say.”

He wonders how she knows that, how she can see through him as easily as she decodes binary. He considers, for a moment, fighting for his dignity, but he doesn’t have that much dignity left and what he has doesn’t need fighting for.

“Also, boss, I’m not gonna back down on this. Either you’re coming to my apartment of your own volition or I’m gonna babysit you the whole way there. You’re a grown man but I’m gonna let you make that choice.”

Juno chuckles. “Yeah, I didn’t think you would. I can always count on you, Rita.”

She looks at him with something fierce in her eyes. Juno flings out an arm in a fruitless gesture; it’s meant to mean, Take me away, something too dramatic to say out loud, but he’s still hazy with sleep and his arm falls to his side. And she’s still looking at him like that.

“Good, then.” While Juno hauls himself to his feet, Rita cinches her coat. She locks the office door behind them and leads Juno to the new subway system, a station just around the corner from their building. Juno can walk the whole way home, but Rita’s place is closer to the heart of the city, where the buildings grow taller and thinner. The subway car rattles around them, clear of afternoon commuters and home to a few drifters, stragglers, teenagers on their ways home from afternoon activities, their backpacks jostling each time the car shudders.

Juno doesn’t have to touch anyone. Inside the car, the overheads fill the car with a greenhouse glow. Juno watches the tunnels pass by, their reddish walls blackened by the stale air. He can hear himself breathe, and everyone else besides. Their breaths come discordant. Juno reaches into his pocket and pops open the bottle of painkillers without looking; he swallows the pills dry.

They emerge on a boulevard in a neighborhood Juno has never seen. The occasional building has a car parked outside it—wide buildings, with slick, red walls—but the road is wide enough to accommodate them. On instinct, Juno glances up to the stars just beginning to peek above the greyed sky. They’re still here, which only makes his sense of disorientation deepen.

“It’s not a tourist destination or anything,” says Rita. Juno doesn’t know whether she’s reassuring or admonishing him for passing judgment, and he isn’t in the mood to pick it apart. It doesn’t matter, anyway; this is Rita, after all.

Despite the dusk, there are kids on the street, kids as young as four, maybe, watched by older siblings or parents just home from work. Their talk and laughter fill the street. The city hasn’t eaten them, yet.

At least half the windows have lights, like fires in the dark.

Juno follows Rita down a side street. It’s not exactly narrow, but it’s devoid of neon and cars. As they walk, Rita roots through her purse and pulls out her keys. On instinct, she grips them between her fingers; then she glances at Juno, whose holstered blaster sits warm against his chest, and she relaxes.

Between the pills and the air, he isn’t thinking so much about his headache anymore.

Juno says, “It’s… nice. It’s really nice.”

It’s better than his, at least. His street always reeks of garbage and half his neighbors follow him with their cold eyes, but, hey, you take what you can get. It’s home.

And Rita beams at him.

She climbs a couple of steps toward a nondescript door with a light on behind it and unlocks it.

They have to climb a rickety staircase up a couple of stories. In her heels, Rita does it deftly, so Juno makes a mental note to wear a pair of his heels next time he visits.

The door says _Rita_ in pink foam, like a university dorm. It’s cute, and it puts Juno at ease. Rita flicks the lights on and lets Juno inside.

Juno’s place is almost out of food and several of the lights are broken. He has bulbs to replace them, but he can’t muster up the energy to change them, not in the small window between coming home from the office and passing out. When it doesn’t smell of Nureyev, it smells hollow, and that’s worse. He keeps telling himself he’ll pull it together, and sometimes he does. For days, he does. He gets his groceries, does his laundry, puts on the radio. He doesn’t make a mess, because that way he doesn’t have anything to clean up.

All things considered, he’s doing pretty good.

At first glance, Rita’s apartment is smaller than his but more lived-in. She has floral curtains on the windows—curtains—and even though the couch and television set are cramped in the main room, even though the kitchen is half the size of Juno’s and the dinner table folds out of the wall, it’s cozy and warm. It feels like a place someone would live.

But Rita says, “It’s not much. And it’s a mess.”

It smells like perfume and burnt electronics and coffee. There are shoes scattered across every rug, a coffee stain on the couch, a plush bathrobe draped across the coffee table. She has a map of the galaxy framed on her living room wall, plush blankets on the couch, wires and wires and wires. Juno can’t think of enough things in modern society that use that many wires.

“Are you kidding?” says Juno. “This whole place is wonderful. It’s so _you._ And if you saw my place, Rita, you’d know.”

“Well, we both know you don’t get out much.”

Juno laughs; it comes out of him easy as tap water. “Okay, you know that my job basically requires me to _get out_.”

“There it is!” says Rita. “That light in your eyes, it just turned on, just like that. I knew it was still there, I knew it.” She pulls him into a warm, awkward hug. And he’s laughing enough that he lets her.

He says, “Okay, okay, you win.”

“Yes!” says Rita, voice rich with triumph. “Operation: Cheer Up Juno Steel is a success. All I had to do was show you the horrible dumpster I live in, and, boom, a Juno smile.”

Their laughter fills up the small space. Slowly, awkwardly, Juno disentangles himself from Rita. The minute she’s free, she zips through the living room faster than Juno has ever seen anyone move. She collects her shoes and stray garments until Juno is sure she’s going to drop something. She shoves open the only closed door, which must lead to her bedroom, and tosses them unceremoniously in. For a moment, she lingers in the doorway.

With her back to Juno, she says, apologetic, “I don’t have a guest room.”

He watches the tenseness settle over her shoulders, a nervousness he associates with making room for a lover. They both know that’s not what this is.

“If I can use one of these blankets,” says Juno, “I’m happy with the couch.”

She lets him take any blankets he wants, so he falls onto the couch and drapes two over his body. He doesn’t take his coat off, though Rita offers to hang his in the closet with hers. It’s warm here. Even without the sleeping pills, Juno feels himself relax for the first time in weeks. Rita is running about behind him, doing what, he doesn’t know.

She says, “Decaf? I’m calling a hard no on caffeine for you, but if you want something warm—”

“I’m good. Thanks, Rita.”

In the end, Rita settles on the opposite end of the cramped couch. She takes a corner of Juno’s blanket and turns on the TV. She clicks a few buttons and then pauses. “You don’t mind, do you? I’m a hundred and seventy-six episodes in, but I can start you at the beginning so you can follow along.”

“Whatever you want to watch,” Juno says.

The show starts, the volume a gentle roar. He doesn’t know if Rita’s picked up in the middle of an episode, but it doesn’t matter. Rita is here, and he doesn’t have to pretend to be anything to get her to stay. He doesn’t have to give half of himself; he doesn’t have to barter. The voices roll over Juno, but he isn’t paying attention. It keeps most of the noise out of his head. The faces flicker, faceless, on the screen.

Outside, the noises of the city roll too, muffled by the window.

Juno dozes, waking with a start each time he falls too heavily into sleep. In these interims, he tracks the gradual shift in the sky. Each time, the television volume is lower, and Rita is curled up in a different position on the couch, her bare toes pressed against his calves.

Early in the morning, he wakes to silence. The image is frozen on the screen, a close-up of a man with a sharp jaw and painted lips, his mouth parted as if to say something. _Goodbye,_ Juno thinks. He doesn’t know where the thought comes from, and it slides out of his head just as easily.

He pulls the blanket up over his shoulders and gets comfortable.

When he wakes again, the sunlight falls hot across his knees, his reaching hand. He is alone on the couch. He takes a few moments to fully open his eyes before he sits up.

Behind him, Rita’s voice says, “Feel any better?”

“You didn’t sleep like that, on the couch, did you?” says Juno.

“I didn’t want you to wake up alone.” It breaks Juno’s heart anew.

Rita continues. “Doesn’t matter if my neck hates me now, because that’s what friends do. And you’re my friend, even if you are my work friend and boss and all that. Breakfast?”

And, because Juno can’t say no, he joins her at the table.

* * *

In his big, empty apartment with its dishes on the counters and its supply of food dwindling in the fridge, with his first night of sleep, however fitful, without pharmaceutical assistance in as long as he cares to remember, Juno Steel strips his bed bare. He opens all the windows. In his head, Rita is saying something about sun and vitamins and happiness. Juno Steel isn’t looking for happy; he’s just looking for one more day to feel okay. To hold onto whatever he had with Rita, that comfortable calm, and the promise of more calm days to come.

He stands in his bedroom window for a long time with his bedsheets in his arms, warm as a body. As though they’ve grown too heavy, he drops them to the floor. No lover has been here. No lover has seen the bed mid-transformation, the apartment a skeleton whose marrow only he can see. Whose beating heart beats first for him.

And maybe that is another thing he wants to believe but doesn’t. Maybe that is another promise. Maybe he has been trying to be okay for too long, and maybe he can’t be.

But he can do this: he can change the sheets. He can pick up the plates and put them in the sink without washing them. He can strip out of yesterday’s clothes and put them in the hamper.

No, he won’t be okay, but he’ll give Rita another day with him, and another after that, and he’ll keep going like this until he knows she will be okay instead. It’s the only way to move forward. His only option.

When he sits on the bed, the mattress sinks beneath him. It’s an old thing, he thinks, without registering the thought. He really should think about replacing it. The sun is hot on his shoulders, the air still as a held breath, and his eyes keep sliding closed.

He falls asleep in the midmorning light, there on the stripped bed.


End file.
